Organizations that utilize enterprise and application server software as part of their enterprise infrastructure are increasingly adopting virtualization technologies as part of their drive to increase utilization and reduce infrastructure costs, while at the same time improving their ability to respond rapidly to a new line of business initiatives.
Hypervisor-based virtualization platforms allow the organization to consolidate their information technology deployments onto a much reduced number of servers running powerful multi-core processors, which in turn host multiple virtual machines running applications in their own protected, virtualized environments. As a result, organizations have been able to optimize their physical infrastructure by pooling hardware and storage resources, reduce physical space, ease power and cooling costs, and improve application availability.
Recently, the focus has shifted to application virtualization—technologies that help information technology operations to package, deploy, monitor and control enterprise applications in these new virtual data centers to achieve flexible, dynamic operations that are more responsive, highly available and efficient. This is the area that embodiments of the present invention are designed to address.